Australia’s strategic environment has changed dramatically over the past decade. The Indo-Pacific is an increasingly complex place to call home and we must be able to more rapidly reshuffle our limited foreign policy resources towards new and emerging issues. This will include engaging with issues in which we currently have little domestic expertise—and limited evidence to inform our policymaking.

The Covid-19 pandemic, particularly the Delta variant, is ravaging countries in the South Pacific, Southeast Asia and South Asia. The region is witnessing a rise in authoritarianism and military rule that is becoming more entrenched. US–China tensions are accelerating technology, data and now stock market bifurcation, bringing economic, national security and social consequences that will reverberate for decades to come.

Governments in the region now regularly run disinformation operations targeting their own populations, including through the use of commercial ‘influence for hire’ actors. Some states have taken advantage of Covid-19 to experiment and take their increasingly sophisticated information capabilities global. As cyber-enabled foreign interference becomes more routine, it’s worth asking whether we’re set up to monitor and counter these threats (hint: we are not).

Intelligence communities around the world find themselves at Covid-19-, technology- and data-induced crossroads that will advantage the proactive and forward-leaning and disadvantage those that stick to the status quo. With intelligence diplomacy more important and valuable than ever, for example, how do states maintain and build international relationships during Covid-19 with restricted travel and limited options for secure communications? And as open-source intelligence and data capabilities become increasingly crucial to inform both long-term and crisis policymaking, how can communities build up these capabilities to keep up with adversaries and to ensure they don’t get left behind by the investments being made by key and larger intelligence partners?

Xinjiang—which few policymakers were working on just a couple years ago—is not just a human rights crisis; it’s now a geopolitical and economic flashpoint. Developments in Xinjiang will continue to consume more whole-of-government policy resources, including in Australia, where, unlike the United States, Britain and Europe, we’ve failed to invest in policy-relevant research to inform decision-making.

One illustrative development in this area, which will soon attract more global attention, is that concerns about forced and coerced Uyghur labour are now quietly driving the rerouting of billions of dollars of supply chains and investment, particularly in the manufacturing and electronics sectors, giving us a real-time example of how the Chinese Communist Party prioritises internal party security over its own economic interests.

The importance of sovereign capability, particularly in strategic and critical technologies, is being reprioritised as governments recognise how vulnerable they are in a crisis. Many states, including Australia, have failed to invest in their (currently shallow) technology research and development bases, or to identify where they need to invest. States that avoid making post-Covid capital investments in critical technologies will get left behind.

And this is just a snapshot of some of the new and emerging issues parliamentarians and policymakers in Australia, and all around the world, are grappling with.

The only way governments can stay on top of these issues is through leveraging policy-relevant analysis and research. Such work provides the crucial evidence base on which good and informed policy can be built, and which enables it to stand the test of time.

While it’s not attracting much public attention, it’s timely that the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade is quietly digging into the issue of funding for public research into foreign policy issues.

Australian research institutes have a more limited pool of potential funding than their North American, UK and European counterparts. Very few foundations in Australia provide funding to foreign-policy-focused research institutes. And the large US- and Europe-based foundations that provide significant funding to think tanks rarely if ever fund policy work outside of those regions. Foreign governments do provide funding to research institutes in Australia, predominantly to universities, and also on occasion to think tanks through competitive grants. But the Australian government and the business community remain the primary sources of funding for research institutes in Australia, and that won’t change anytime soon.

The funding base we have built up for ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre over the past few years, for example, is broad and involves a mix of research and capacity-building grants from the Australian government and foreign governments (the US, the UK, Japan, Canada and the Netherlands), as well as annual corporate or government sponsorship. Fundraising is a role of the seniors in our 30-person centre to help support the teams they manage and the projects they want to work on. Funding is raised year to year and most grants are for six to 12 months, which limits planning-time horizons.

While Australia has a rich pool of foreign policy talent, spread across the government and nongovernment sectors, it currently lacks a think tank sector of sufficient size and breadth to provide the diversity and depth of perspective and analysis which is critical to robust policymaking. The 2020 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report recorded 2,203 think tanks in the US, 515 in the UK and 45 in Australia (many of which, it should be noted, are tiny). On a per capita basis, that’s approximately one think tank per 149,000 people in the US, one per 129,000 people in the UK and under one per 500,000 people in Australia.

The relatively small size of the sector is a product of several likely factors. They include the different Australian tax treatments of philanthropy and the lack of the philanthropic tradition that characterises the US think tank sector, in which some of the oldest and most respected institutions were established with large endowments from industrialists early in the 20th century.

This parliamentary inquiry will have to consider whether enough money is being spent on foreign policy research in Australia. But this isn’t just a case of funnelling in more government money—though, if done well, that would help and would allow organisations to sustain multi-year programs of work instead of scraping together dozens of small grants to make it through the year. But additional resources would not, in and of themselves, generate better public policy outcomes, or a stronger public policy discourse.

There are a number of ways Australia could optimise the potential for high-quality, policy-relevant output, especially in our small think-tank sector. We’ll deal with those tomorrow in the second part of this post.

The 2016 Australia–China joint economic report, Partnership for change—a study undertaken by the China Center for International Economic Exchanges and the Australian National University—argues that ‘Capturing the economic potential of the relationship will depend on how both the public and private sectors in Australia and China engage up close and shape the relationship.’ Getting the most out of the relationship for both countries, it states, will ‘require a functional understanding among policymakers, corporate leaders and the broader community of the changes that will shape China and the regional and global environment in the next 10 years’.

Five years on, the relationship has certainly changed, but not in ways that the authors of that report would have hoped or imagined. While there’s not much partnership or ‘up close’ engagement to speak of these days, certainly at the government-to-government level, the relationship is being shaped by a more attuned Australian understanding of China’s tactics and intentions.

Beijing’s nationalist rhetoric and its efforts in recent years to permanently reshape the strategic landscape of the region have changed everything. Once peripheral concerns within the Australian community about China’s willingness to use force and coercion to achieve its goals are now widespread. Last week’s halting of a range of exports from Australia in violation of both World Trade Organization rules and the 2015 China–Australia Free Trade Agreement is the latest in a series of actions that demonstrate Beijing’s willingness to punish those it thinks have stepped out of line.

That these punitive actions are politically motivated is now indisputable. Summoning the impulses to downplay the seriousness of the challenge we face is much harder than it used to be. The relationship needs to change, but how?

Our biggest challenge might lie in confronting the most basic assumption that has guided Australia’s engagement with China since the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1972—namely, that economic activity is always going to be the main route to advancing the bilateral relationship.

If the boundaries between political, economic and strategic interests continue to blur and China’s leaders continue to expect deference in return for that activity, it will certainly not be. Fading delineations mean it is no longer possible to isolate the economic or strategic component of the relationship without fear of political sensitivities getting in the way.

In that bleak environment, a new emphasis on values is likely to have a more positive impact on the overall development of the bilateral relationship. It has always felt to me that not emphasising values in our dealings with China inadvertently signalled to Beijing a willingness to trade them away.

Looking back, the problem for those who have sought to keep values at arm’s length from the Australia–China relationship, particularly the economic dimension of it, was generally understood not as one concerning the importance of values themselves, but the likelihood of upsetting China when we are forced to act in accordance with them, or of looking weak and unprincipled when we should but do not.

With China already upset with us and the bilateral relationship at near breaking point, it makes little sense to keep thinking this way. Now might be the time to try something new.

‘It is extremely dubious whether uncritical, loyal support for a bad, failed American policy will have enhanced our standing as an ally in the long run. A reputation for being dumb but loyal and eager is not one to be sought.’

— Owen Harries, After Iraq, 2006

The admonition that Australian strategy must be smart and cautious, not dumbly eager, is classic Owen Harries.

Much as he loved the US, Harries always warned his adopted country, Australia, to maintain a constant, steady gaze on the dangers as well as the blessings of the alliance.

In embracing the US, Harries noted in 2003, Australia must never forget that great powers are cold monsters, little motivated by gratitude.

These were central themes in the final two decades of his life, when he returned to Australia from editing The National Interest in Washington, joining the Sydney think tanks the Centre for Independent Studies and the Lowy Institute.

Harries was happy to share his understanding (no light without heat) that good think tanks, like good thinkers, must have good fights. The founding head of the Lowy Institute, Allan Gyngell, gives this example of the Owen effect:

New to the world of political controversy and with my lingering public servant’s sense that controversy was to be avoided, I was shaken by the public attacks on the first Lowy poll in 2005, especially in The Australian newspaper, when we found Australian attitudes to the United States that showed the Australian people not quite so enthusiastic as commentators had been arguing. (The results, in fact, were remarkably similar to those this year: a clear distinction in the public mind between attitudes towards the US and its president and support for the alliance.)

Anyway, I was feeling quite shaken by the battering (charges of push polling, et cetera). But then Owen came to my rescue. I still remember him springing through the front door of Bligh Street with his eyes alight and a broad beam on his face, saying, ‘You must be absolutely delighted by the response. Just what you want!’ He made me realise for the first time that I was in a different business now.

Gyngell said it was an illustration of why Harries was so important in the early days of the Lowy effort to create an Oz think tank devoted to foreign policy: ‘Owen knew what public debate was and how you generate it, but although he had strong views himself, he was intellectually fully open to other ideas. In any case, he thoroughly enjoyed the stoush.’

Harries distilled his world view in six Boyer lectures for the ABC in 2003, gathered under the heading, Benign or imperial? Reflections on American hegemony. His core question: Can America’s great power be contained or balanced?

The final lecture—‘Punching above our weight?’—is a brilliant bit of work. In it, Harries divides Oz diplomacy into three schools, defined through the personalities of Australian leaders: the US alliance (the Menzies tradition), multilateralism and the UN (the Evatt tradition), and the region (the Spender–Casey–Keating tradition).

The US alliance, à la Menzies

The realist view of the world is expressed by Australia’s longest-serving prime minister, Robert Menzies, with John Howard as the Menzies manifestation of our times. The Menzies tradition is all about Australia allying with a ‘great and powerful friend’.

Harries pronounced: ‘As a realist and a conservative, Menzies was sceptical of abstract, general schemes. He looked to interest rather than principle as the motive for action, to history and experience rather than abstract reasoning for the basis of sound judgement.’

Australia gives political and military support to maintain the system and seeks security in return. The mindset confers political advantage and was ‘highly congenial to Menzies personally’ because he was ‘wired into the main game of global power politics in a way that was otherwise impossible’. A visit to the White House matters, for personal, political and policy reasons.

Multilateralism and the UN, à la Evatt

As exemplified by Labor’s H.V. Evatt, this tradition is both nationalist and internationalist, seeking to establish Australia’s independence while cleaving to the framework of international rules and laws:

[I]international organisations are regarded as the most congenial and effective forums for a middle power like Australia to register its presence and extend its influence.

This tradition is assertive and energetic. It is concerned to give Australia a high profile as a country capable of making a distinctive contribution to international affairs. Sometimes it leads to hyper-activity and attention-seeking.

The core Harries (and realist) critique of Evatt internationalism is in this: ‘Power politics tends to be seen as chosen mode of behaviour, rather than something inherent in a system of sovereign states and necessary for survival.’

The region, à la Spender, Casey and Keating

The quest for Australia’s place as a natural regional player is represented by two Liberal foreign ministers and a Labor PM. Each was passionate about Asia while being firmly wedded to the alliance. The traditions aren’t separate, but intertwine and interact.

The Menzies and Evatt traditions colour Australia’s approach to the region. It starts with a first-principles commitment to the US alliance system. Working from that base, Canberra has strained mightily to help build diplomatic and strategic structures that can span the Asia–Pacific.

What this demands of Australia in the 21st century is that we achieve a balance between alliance and region. And that thought about balance—between power and purposes, commitments and resources—is at the heart of Harries’s thinking.

In a conference room in Canberra in 2002, discussing the chances and choices offered by Indonesia’s new democracy, I argued that Australia should abandon its traditional attachment to the Indonesian military as a base for stability. Starting his logical demolition of my paper, Harries told me, with a suitably Kantian knout, ‘He who wills the ends, must will the means.’

Such was the prudence Harries offered Australia in concluding his Boyer lectures. Punching above our weight, he said, may produce pride, but it’s ‘also hazardous and a form of activity best avoided’. Better to follow one of the most important sentences ever written about foreign policy, penned in the 1940s by Walter Lippmann:

‘Without the controlling principle that the nation must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, its purposes within its means and its means equal to its purposes, its commitments related to its resources and its resources adequate to its commitment, it is impossible to think at all about foreign affairs.’

With that grand flourish, Harries went to the minor key to end with typically dry advice: ‘Those responsible for Australian foreign policy could do worse than have that sentence framed and hung prominently on their office wall.’

Many Americans say they want a moral foreign policy but disagree on what that means. Using a three-dimensional scorecard encourages us to avoid simplistic answers and to look at the motives, means and consequences of a US president’s actions.

Consider, for example, the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes. When people call for a ‘Reaganite foreign policy’, they mean to highlight the clarity of his rhetoric in the presentation of values. Clearly stated objectives helped educate and motivate the public at home and abroad.

But that was only one aspect of Reagan’s foreign policy. The success of his moral leadership also relied on his means of bargaining and compromise. The key question is whether he was prudent in balancing his objectives and the risks of trying to achieve them.

Reagan’s initial rhetoric in his first term created a dangerous degree of tension and distrust between the United States and the Soviet Union, increasing the risk of a miscalculation or accident leading to war. But it also created incentives to bargain, which Reagan later put to good use when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union. Reagan advanced US national interests, and he did so in a manner that did not exclusively benefit America.

In contrast, George H.W. Bush, by his own admission, did not promote a transformative foreign-policy vision at the end of the Cold War. His goal was to avoid disaster during a period of rapid and far-reaching geopolitical change. While he referred to a ‘new world order’, he never spelled out what it would look like. As Bush and his team responded to forces that were largely outside of his control, he set goals that balanced opportunities and prudence.

Bush limited his short-term aims in order to pursue long-term stability, prompting some critics to complain that he didn’t set more ambitious objectives. Instead, he was prudent in a turbulent time and managed to achieve American goals in a manner that was not unduly insular and did minimal damage to the interests of foreigners. He was careful not to humiliate Gorbachev and to manage Boris Yeltsin’s transition to leadership in Russia.

With better communication skills, Bush might also have been able to do more to educate the American public about the changing nature of the world they faced after the Cold War. But given the uncertainties of history, and the potential for disaster as the Cold War ended, Bush had one of the best foreign policies of the period after 1945. He allowed the US to benefit from the Cold War’s outcome while avoiding calamity.

His son, George W. Bush, started his first term in office with limited interest in foreign policy, but his objectives became transformational after the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. He became focused on national security but turned to the rhetoric of democracy to rally his followers in a time of crisis. His 2002 national security strategy, which came to be called the ‘Bush doctrine’, proclaimed that the US would ‘identify and eliminate terrorists wherever they are, together with the regimes that sustain them’.

In this new game, there were few rules and inadequate attention to the means. Bush’s solution to the terrorist threat was to spread democracy, and a ‘freedom agenda’ thus became the basis of his 2006 national security strategy. But he lacked the means to democratise Iraq. The removal of Saddam Hussein did not accomplish the mission, and inadequate understanding of the context, together with poor planning and management, undercut Bush’s grand objectives. The result was a sectarian civil war in Iraq and a strengthening of the terrorist groups that eventually became Islamic State.

A perpetual problem in US foreign policy is the complexity of the context, which increases the likelihood of unintended consequences. Prudence is sometimes dismissed as mere self-interest, but in foreign policy it becomes a virtue. Negligent assessment and reckless risk-taking often lead to immoral consequences, or what in legal terms is called ‘culpable negligence’. Prudence also requires the ability to manage one’s emotions. In both respects, President Donald Trump’s rejection of intelligence and reliance on television commentators raises serious moral as well as practical questions about his foreign policy.

That leads, in turn, to the question of the role of institutions and how broadly a president defines America’s national interest. A president’s foreign policy depends not just on specific actions, but also on how a pattern of actions shapes the environment of world politics. Leadership by the world’s most powerful country in the supply of global public goods is consistent with ‘America first’, but it rests on a broader understanding of that term than Trump has shown. As former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger has put it, ‘Calculations of power without a moral dimension will turn every disagreement into a test of strength … Moral prescriptions without concern for equilibrium, on the other hand, tend toward either crusades or an impotent policy tempting challenges; either extreme risks endangering the coherence of the international order itself.’

Prudence is a necessary virtue for a good foreign policy, but it is not sufficient. American presidents have been prudent when they needed to embrace a broader institutional vision. In the future, a sense of vision and strategy that correctly understands and responds to new technological and environmental changes—such as cyber threats, artificial intelligence, climate change and pandemics—will be crucial.

A moral foreign policy not only makes Americans safer, but also makes the world a better place. We judge moral policy by looking at behaviour and institutions, at acts of commission and omission, and at all three dimensions of motives, means and consequences. Even then, the nature of foreign policy—with its many contingencies and unforeseen events—means that we will often wind up with mixed verdicts.

‘You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.’ — Leon Trotsky

To shift Trotsky’s line a few degrees, Australians may not be interested in foreign affairs, but foreign affairs is interested in Australia.

The Russian revolutionary puts a lot of political weight into the truth that in this life you don’t always get what you want. And what you do get can be a nasty surprise.

As originally uttered, Trotsky probably said ‘dialectic’ rather than ‘war’, yet it’s still an elegant thought.

I thought of the Trotsky truth during a day at the Australian National University devoted to discussion of the teaching of Oz foreign policy in our universities.

The forum explored connections between academics and the broader Australian foreign policy community and what’s needed to ‘reinvigorate Australian foreign policy studies’.

The troubles of Oz foreign policy find a particular expression in the universities. In you-may-not-be-interested mode, most unis don’t contemplate our foreign policy. Only 12 of our 39 universities teach an Australian foreign policy course at any level of study. At many institutions, Oz foreign policy is one of the courses that’s ‘resting’; it’s not offered because there aren’t staff to teach it or because it’s not in high demand from students.

As the ANU’s Benjamin Day commented, Oz foreign policy can be both ‘provincial and pragmatic’. And much like the continent, the subject can be ‘arid and isolated’. This is one of the many differences between the views of the subject in the US and Australia. ‘US foreign policy is like God—it’s everywhere’, James Cotton observed.

For those building a teaching and research career, Oz foreign policy is too niche and too close to the world of think tanks for academic respectability. As another leading academic lamented, ‘No one wants to own it as a specialisation and few want to teach it.’

Plenty of academics research and write on Oz foreign policy, but it’s a dangerous career move to specialise only in Australian foreign relations.

As an area of secondary research, much is happening. In the last 50 issues of the Australian Journal of International Affairs, only four editions failed to have an article with an Oz dimension.

When discussion turns to how academics should influence politicians and policy, the cross-currents turn strong and murky.

One current is the need for academic independence and caution about ‘capture’ by government processes. For the ANU, this worry can be expressed in its campus geography: stroll to the lake and peer across at the parliamentary triangle.

The opposing current is the wish to shape policy, to get closer to the parliamentary triangle to influence what Canberra does.

The two currents are about freedom and function. The need is to think freely about policy. Yet to be a policy force, you’ve got to get close to the machinery and serve its functions.

Not much has changed in the clash of these two currents in the more than six years since Lee Morgenbesser wrote a journal article on a survey revealing the state of mind of Oz international relations academics.

The most ‘significant and alarming finding’, he judged, was how university demands are ‘undermining scholars’ attempt to forge closer, more influential ties with policy makers in Canberra. In fact, it is clear from the results that what academics research and how they go about it is actually counterintuitive to this goal.’

The great divide between policymakers and academics was starkly stated at the ANU forum by Allan Behm, a long-time Canberra wise owl. Behm has been serving as chief of staff to the shadow foreign minister, Penny Wong, and a range of his excellent previous meditations on Oz policy can be found here on The Strategist.

Behm reckons that what universities want from academics are perverse incentives when it comes to having any influence in Canberra.

‘Your incentives make you irrelevant in public policy’, Behm said. ‘You don’t appear in the places where we look for you. You are very hard to find in the opinion pages of the Australian media.’

Academic invisibility is bad for the unis but equally bad for Australia, he said, because levels of knowledge and education within a society ‘play into critical aspects of national power’.

From the Canberra side, add in the risk-aversion of the bureaucracy and the headache of getting security clearances for academics.

While the obstacles stack up, tough times are confronting many with the Trotsky truth, and the need to think new thoughts about foreign policy.

The forum was driven by the optimism of a Canberra outsider, the US scholar Professor Valerie M. Hudson, who is the inaugural vice-chancellor’s ‘Australia in the world’ visiting fellow at ANU. She launched the day by getting a roomful of Oz academics to commit to a loud Texas greeting: ‘Howdy!’

Hudson’s positive message was not to agonise, but organise. She called for the creation of an Australian foreign policy association, not least to share syllabuses, readings and tips across universities (I was surprised this doesn’t already happen).

The professor said Australia needs the insight and analysis of its academics, and she concluded with a sharp jest: ‘There’s already a robust foreign policy school looking at Australian foreign policy. It’s in the Chinese intelligence system. If they can do it, you can too.’